Painful pictures

February 01, 2005

It was almost like he was grinning at me from inside the golden frame.

Cpl. Jimmy Buie’s face, with his characteristic grin, peered out from the top of a stack of identical picture frames leaning against a wall in the 39th Infantry Brigade’s personnel office.

The frames sat in a corner, almost out of sight.

I wouldn’t have noticed them, but Buie’s familiar face caught my eye.

Buie died with two of his fellow Bravo Company soldiers in a horrific roadside bomb blast Jan. 4. The day is remembered by soldiers across 3rd Battalion who helped secure the scene and gather the mens’ bodies.

It was like a nightmare, they say.

As I walked over to take a closer look at Buie’s picture, I was struck by just how many of those frames were piled up.

I flipped each one back to find another familiar face looking at me.

They’re all faces that will only be seen in pictures from now on.

They’re all men who have died here.

And they’re all men from the Bowie Brigade who are missed by their buddies, day in and day out.

Tomorrow, another man will be memorialized.

And another gold frame will be filled.

This time, the face will be of a father whose daughter saw him only once. She was born as he flew to Iraq one year ago.

Spc. Lyle Rymer was cut down by a single sniper bullet last week.

His death brought his platoon — of 239th Engineer Company — to tears.

I guess it’s the sheer space being taken up by the pictures that hit me.

The list of names of soldiers lost in the 39th Brigade is longer than any other National Guard unit has seen in Iraq since the war began on March 19, 2003. It’s longer than the list of casualties suffered by any single country with soldiers in Iraq with the exception of the United States and Great Britain.

The stack of framed faces hits much heavier than a list of names.

Every time a soldier has died here — beginning with the brigade’s first loss on April 7, 2004 — the words, “I hope this is our last,” echo across camp.

And there is always a reply: “I’m afraid it’s not.”

Ask Maj. Michael Spraggins if he thought he’d be called on to play taps as often as he has and I bet he’d say no. The Hope High School music instructor is the brigade’s bugler and master of the saddest song I’ve ever heard.

Now, as the brigade prepares for home, the hope that each death is the last hangs even heavier.

Soldiers say it’s even harder.

It’s harder to think of making it this far, surviving this much, just to die when home is in sight.

No one wants that pile of frames — which will likely be hung somewhere in Arkansas where they can be seen often and the faces remembered always — to grow any taller.

Posted by Amy at February 1, 2005 04:49 AM